It was, he would later tell a confidant, like something out of TheGodfather. Bill Simmons was meeting with two of the most powerful executives at ESPN, John Skipper and John Walsh, in a conference room in ESPN's then-unfinished Los Angeles office hard by the Staples Center. Within three years, this would be the…»9/26/14 2:32pm 9/26/14 2:32pm

One of the most influential men in sports pawing women in a hotel bar in front of a couple enemies with old scores to settle—and much of it surreptitiously captured on video? It sounds like the stuff of an investigation carried out by one of ESPN's harder-charging journalistic franchises. Instead, it's one night… »7/01/14 9:00am 7/01/14 9:00am

The New York Jets have three games left to play and despite an unexpected itchy eruption of theoretically possible playoff chances—one game behind whahuh?—they're not a draw going down the stretch. The Chargers-Jets Sunday game on Dec. 23 gets the distinction of being the only game this year that NBC flexed out of its…»12/10/12 2:37pm 12/10/12 2:37pm

It has been 148 days since we first informed you of Lynn Hoppes's copy-and-pasting habits. And dear reader, it's over. All it took for ESPN to acknowledge the widespread plagiarism in its archives was for the company's news honcho, John Walsh, to float a rumor in front of a class of journalism students that I was… »12/06/12 10:45am 12/06/12 10:45am

LOS ANGELES—On Nov. 5, ESPN Senior VP Joan Lynch woke up in her home to find a front tire of her vehicle slashed. This is notable for two reasons. The first is that Lynch lives in the Pacific Palisades, which is not the sort of neighborhood where one gets one's tires slashed. The Palisades is west of Brentwood; it's a… »11/14/11 6:25pm 11/14/11 6:25pm

The Joke That Started It All Shortly after 9 a.m. Friday, in a big gray conference room in a big gray convention center, 1,500 people—mostly white, mostly male, mostly clad in business suits—roar with laughter. Jeff Van Gundy, the former Knicks and Rockets coach and current ESPN analyst, has just cracked wise. Jeff… »3/10/11 2:32pm 3/10/11 2:32pm

ESPN Executive VP and Editor John Walsh snarks back at Keith Olbermann in today's SportsBusiness Daily, and suddenly the Olbermann-Simmons feud has become one of those great Greek tragedies full of incest and bloodshed and men with stately white beards. »3/11/10 4:35pm 3/11/10 4:35pm